Altech Software—IBM i to .NET Framework
Download Altech Case Study (PDF)
At a glance…
Customer profile:
Altech Software Limited of Hawthorn, England provides integrated software applications to food manufacturers with turnover of over £5 million.
Situation:
The IBM i interface limited Altech’s ability to attract new customers and operate in new markets.
Solution:
With the help of Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner ASNA, Altech migrated its solution code from IBM i to the Microsoft .NET Framework.
Benefits:
- New distribution channels
- Increased sales
- Migration savings of 75%
Products:
ASNA Visual RPG for .NET, ASNA DataGate, DB2/400, SQL Server
Challenge
Altech originally developed its software for the IBM i application market. Target users familiar mainly with Microsoft Office tools are unlikely to adopt an IBM i application, so Altech realized a new interface was needed.
“Our end-user target customers have little or no experience with the IBM i user interface,” Altech Commercial Director Alan Blyther says. “Conversion to AVR.NET was essential to market our solution.”
Altech’s goal was to take several hundred thousand lines of legacy code and create an interface acceptable to new business customers while integrating end solution modules in customers’ required core functions.
Altech also wanted to add a revenue channel offering migration services to other IBM legacy application users, enabling adaptation of the Microsoft interface with the option of moving to an SQL Server platform.
The company investigated simple migration, rewriting or replacing the existing platform. Wholesale replacement and rewriting, however, were more risky, costly, and time consuming.
Speed to market and price were compelling factors in seeking a solution, and estimates on both were high. Average estimates on migrations were plugged as taking a year or longer and costs were significant.
These solutions did not fully meet Altech’s needs, as the company required a system compatible with users’ capabilities and needs in order to add revenue channels, offer services and financially benefit the company in a fast- growing market— factors that time-consuming, costly rewrites, or platform replacements would impede.
Project Benefits
By migrating its solution to the AVR.NET framework, Altech expects to exponentially increase sales percentages, offer a more profitable business model to users, open up new markets, and venture into more profitable business models such as “software as a service.” In addition, by using ASNA tools, the migration time and cost were significantly reduced.
Migration Savings of 50 Percent: The migration was both fast—taking only four months—and cost effective. Altech saved 75 percent of what it would have spent for an evaluation and core migration using an alternative approach.
Moreover, by using an interface application, Altech took advantage of its legacy code application in the AVR.NET framework environment rather than rewriting code from scratch. This extended the company’s return on its investment in that code and avoided an additional investment to debug and perfect new code. This process also enabled Altech to retain control of the migration project in-house.
Increased Revenues: Since implementing the ASNA solution, Blyther reports significant increases in sales percentages. With the capability of supporting SQL Server, additional “Vision For Food” SQL Server modules and enhancements currently in development in the AVR.NET environment and other Visual Studio environments for electronic interfacing with external users, revenue will continue to grow.
The move is enabling Altech to focus on more lucrative software distribution channels within the UK while following a vision of customer integration with modules offering end solutions to food companies in core functions required by food technical and development departments.
“The critical indicators of successful migration,” Blyther concludes, “have been that it works, that it is a true Web application, that it supports either DB2 or SQL Server, and that it was delivered on budget and within our launch timeline.”
About ASNA
ASNA, provides comprehensive and flexible solutions for modernizing IBM i applications to the Microsoft .NET platform. ASNA enables companies to integrate and extend their solutions to .NET, the Web and beyond, while preserving investments in IT and human resources. ASNA solutions are distributed worldwide and used by more than a million end users.
ASNA is a Gold Level partner of Microsoft’s Partner Network, Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner, and an Advanced Tier Member of IBM’s PartnerWorld for Developers. ASNA is also a gold level partner of Microsoft’s Platform Modernization Alliance.